Courses

Your course schedule as a Next System Fellow is fairly simple. You will meet in-person on Tuesdays on the Mason Square campus in Arlington, and in-person at the Fairfax campus and/or online on Thursdays and Fridays (depending on which electives you've chosen).

  • Undergraduate students admitted as Next System Fellows enroll in three classroom courses and a six-credit internship course for a total of 15 credits.
  • Graduate students admitted as Next System Fellows enroll in two classroom courses and one six-credit practicum course, for a total of 12 credits.

We are preparing our course program for the 2024 Next System Fellows. The program will build on lessons learned in our first two years. Our 2023 course offerings will look a lot like what we offered in 2022:

  • Next System Studies Seminar - GOVT 319, SOCI 395/SOCI 633, CULT 860 - This has been the core seminar for the Next System Fellows and is required of all students. See the "About Next System Studies" page to get a sense of materials covered.
  • Power, Politics, and Society/Political Sociology Seminar - GOVT 319, SOCI 340/SOCI 633 - This course is required of all undergraduate students and an elective for graduate students. The power to maintain or to change our society shapes our lives. Where does that power come from, how does it function, and how can we exercise power? Gain a critical understanding of concepts of relational power, state formation, governance, elites and masses, social classes, the racial state, patriarchy, hegemony and resistance, revolutions, social movements, corporate power, nationalism and citizenship, transnational networks, global capitalism and the world system. 
  • Social Movements and Political Protest/Social Movement Studies Seminar - SOCI 307, GOV 319/SOCI 633 - This elective course is a new offering for Next System Fellows this year. This course provides students with a comprehensive curriculum on social movement research and theory, taught by a professor with decades of experience working to build and researching and writing about social movements. We introduce you to the kinds of questions posed and concepts applied by social movement scholars in their research, examining particular cases as we do so. We turn to three significant traditions in social movement theory - contention, identification, and praxis - and their implications for both academic research design and actual movements. Finally, we will together take up the challenge of organizing systemic movements in the "Decisive Decade" of the 2020s. 
  • Data, Technology and Society/Social Networks, New Media, and Inequality - CDS 290, INTS 375, GLOA 398, GVPT, SOCI 391/SOCI 633 - This course is an elective for all students. In this course, we explore the new technologies, social relations, and practices emerging in the course of the latest waves of the data revolution as contested terrains in a struggle between digital authoritarianization and digital democratization. In particular, we consider how this immediate struggle is shaping the conditions for the emergence of the next system. 

  • Internship Practicum - SOCI 416/616 or the equivalent in ANTH, INTS, GLOA, GOVT, GVIP, EVPP or another program - This is a required course for all students and involves independent scholarly research grounded in a student's internship or other supervised practice. Students enrolled in this course produce a term research project, maintain a research journal, and meet with their supervising instructor and other enrolled students in order to receive constructive feedback.

These courses may also significantly help Next System Fellows advance toward completion of their major, minor, and some concentrations. For instance, the Internship Practicum course may fill the Capstone requirement. We encourage you to talk with your undergraduate or graduate advisor. 

Note that students who have already completed any of the listed courses can opt out of taking those again.